A 1950 syndicated newspaper article about what we now call the Lavender Scare read: “SENATE UNIT ADVISED TO READ KINSEY. Nor was it just nascent gay activists paying attention. Meanwhile, Kinsey had begun publicly advocating for repeal of laws against consensual sodomy in 1949.
Hay, still married himself, hosted several gatherings ostensibly to discuss the book everyone was talking about but actually to promote his ideas for organizing finding little interest, even mockery and hostility, until November 1950 when he and four others founded the Mattachine Society, the first enduring gay rights group in the United States.
Younger, unmarried males have regularly given us some record of sexual contacts with older, married males.” Only 3 per cent of the married males of college level have admitted homosexual experience after marriage – mostly between the ages of 31 and 35. When I asked him where he’d been, he’d say: “Oh, out with the boys.”Ī pioneer in non-binary documentation, Kinsey wrote: “About 13 per cent of the high school level has admitted such experience after marriage and between the ages of 21 and 25. Kinsey!”, one of several songs he inspired, was banned on the radio which only triggered sales allegedly 500,000 copies in three months. Vocalist/comedienne Martha Raye’s satirical “Ooh, Dr. According to Kinsey team member Wardell Pomeroy, after one interviewee realized how many experiences with men he’d acknowledged “he rushed to the bathroom to vomit.” His profession? Psychiatrist. But the implication of higher numbers spoke for itself. Kinsey thought it impossible to identify who are “homosexual” or “heterosexual.” It was only possible to identify and tabulate numbers of psychological reactions and overt behaviors. So, with my copy under one arm, a sheaf of papers under the other, I go through the entire gay community as I know it at that time – which isn’t much.”Īlso shocking was how many Kinsey convinced to confide in him when a single sex act with another man could then lead to prison from one year in several states to life in Connecticut, Georgia, and Nevada. Turned out, we were thousands in every city that even he knew about. “It was a shocker for us because we had assumed that we were a few hundred in every city. Next to Kinsey on the Wall, late fellow honoree Harry Hay had long dreamed of an organization of gays and gave Kinsey and his research credit for mobilizing him in 1948. The news you care about, reported on by the people who care about you:Īs Lambda Legal luminary Tom Stoddard once told The Washington Post, “Civil rights shouldn’t be a matter of numbers, but they are.” Ours started with Kinsey’s 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male based on interviews with 5300 men that shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and across the bow of Society’s ship of gender expectation. Related: Remembering transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen Get the Daily Brief He now appears along with Harvey Milk, Edie Windsor, José Sarria, Christine Jorgensen, Bayard Rustin, and others, among the 50 individuals on the permanent National LGBTQ Wall of Honor “honoring pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” who “contributed to the advancement of the LGBTQ community in a substantive way.”
On June 27 th, 2019, the late bisexual Indiana University (IU) zoology professor’s name was finally immortalized where it should have been long ago: in New York’s Stonewall Inn. Sadly, for the last quarter century or so, calling Alfred Kinsey “the man who made the homosexual movement possible” has come not from that movement but the anti-gay industry. There was a time when one out of every two Americans Gallup polled knew Alfred Kinsey’s name, and to gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender pioneers including Louise Lawrence and Christine Jorgensen he was a living hero.
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